One man's ice house

Around Minnesota, there are two kids of people: those who get away from it all in their ice houses and those who get away from it all in their hangars. OK, maybe there's more than that, but that'll have to do for purposes of this discussion.

It's no secret that I'm not a "spend every waking minute building" kind of airplane builder. I'm a "build when you feel like it" guy, which suits my financing method.

When I moved the project to the hangar, I was a little concerned that I wouldn't work on it much since it wouldn't be in the garage. Truth is, though, I didn't work on it that much when it was in the garage. There was always a distraction; always something around the house to be done, even if it was vacuuming carpets and doing the laundry.

I go to the hangar now in about two-hour increments and when I'm there, I'm focused only on building, which is a good thing, I guess.

On Sunday, I fixed that vertical stabilizer attach problem I wrote about a few months ago. I settled for one of the options that Van's Aircraft's Joe Blank suggested.

A third pair of bolts should work fine. I had to wait until the project was at the ice house, I mean hangar, because the VS wouldn't fit on the plane in the garage.

I've put in 39 hours on the project since last November 1. It feels like more than a year ago, but I looked at Kitlog and last year I put in 47. Of course, 30 of those consisted of drilling out and replacing the wing doubler and attach point on the right wing.